I've never seen or heard of Amazon taking orders this fast for a movie that JUST came out. I guess they are trying to strike while the iron is hot and grab those potential sales as soon as customers walk out of the theater. It's actually a smart business model and something I would have done years ago with the format. It has just always been a question about the company actually having a product they intended to sell at a later date that would make this work.

We might be seeing the dawn of new business plan. This could be brilliant. As you suggested, the folks just finished watching this and slobbering to have this, anything, related to movie will be just fine.

White I find personally funny, way back in 1978, when I was finishing up my 2 year graphic’s program, one of my fellow students decided to include in his business portfolio, an illustrated phaser from Star Trek. He was our local nerd. I believe he got an OK grade for doing good ink work, but he got slammed for including something in portfolio that, at the time, was not well suited for finding a job.

Holy cow, I can't believe how Paramount f'ed up the Blu-ray release of the movie: you get different special features depending on where you buy the movie. it's not little things, it's the content cut into thirds, you don't have the option of getting all of them. It's a total slap in the face to Trek fans. Give it a week, I guarantee you there will be a torrent with ALL the special features from all the releases collated, and the people who care about that will download it rather than buy an inferior version (especially at 40 bucks a pop).

Now, I have nothing against exclusive content, but that should be more optional extras, little figures and different boxes, the stuff ON the disc should be the the same. MAYBE with slight differences, I was thinking the skin of the menus might be different based on the exclusive boxes, but you don't screw people with the actual content that they're paying for.

But adding parts of Summer Glau's home phone number into multiple copies definitely will. Yes, buy all 3 different copies to collect her entire phone number, and then call her and ask for your grand prize......an all expense paid 2 week cruise with her to your destination of choice. Sh*t, I'd buy every damn copy for THAT!!!!!!!!!!!

If you’re not a **** DVD/Blu-ray enthusiast, you may not be aware of an interesting kerfuffle that’s just arisen. But while it might only seem to affect your more devoted variety of Star Trek fans on the surface, it serves as a case study of what’s going wrong with the physical media world at this moment.

This summer, the Paramount film Star Trek Into Darkness managed an impressive thing for a major blockbuster released in 2013 — not only was it critically popular for the most part, but it actually managed to make some money at the box office, as well.

But the site Trekcore.com last week ran an extraordinarily thorough review of the upcoming Blu-ray release of Star Trek Into Darkness — one that rated the Blu-ray transfer quality at five stars, but the special features at 0.5 stars.

Why such a dramatic difference in the ratings? Because, as Trekcore lays out:

There’s no denying that the high definition presentation of this film looks absolutely beautiful — but this is the most confusing, exploitative release ever to bear the Star Trek name.

The primary issue is that of “retailer exclusives” — different versions of the film being packaged with different sets of special features, depending on where you buy the film once it’s available September 10th on Blu-ray.

This means getting an entirely different set of behind-the-scenes featurettes if you buy the film from Target versus Best Buy, and that’s only within the United States — other international releases feature additional features and visual options (including a German edition which may include IMAX-formatted footage).

Plus, the only way to acquire any version of the film that includes an audio commentary is to either buy the film on iTunes or use the accompanying digital download code on the Apple service.

That gets you access to the “visual commentary track” — which is not tied to the original download, but is instead a five GB download of the film described by TrekCore as follows:

And while director J.J. Abrams and cast members have mentioned the existence of at least two deleted scenes, the only sign TrekCore could find of those scenes being available on Blu-ray was an upcoming Australian release — a release that may also be tied to another retailer exclusive in that country.

One of those two known deleted scenes, just for the record, is a shower scene featuring fangirl icon/breakout star Benedict Cumberbatch, which Abrams teased earlier this year on Conan. That seems like something that would sell a few box sets.

Amazon rankings, at time of writing, did have pre-orders for Into Darkness at #17 in the Movies & TV category, and the film is also at #4 on the iTunes best-sellers chart. But according to TorrentFreak, a torrent of Into Darkness is already the second-most downloaded movie of last week.

Special features don’t seem to have popped up on BitTorrent yet, but that’s not hard to imagine changing in the next few weeks. Because that’s going to be the only real way to get a complete set — Paramount has no track record for creating “complete” editions of its past Blu-ray releases.

So what does this ultimately mean for the film’s release? It’s not necessarily something the casual viewer will notice — the casual viewer will probably be content with the iTunes edition, or waiting for it to be available on VOD or other streaming options.

But that’s because the casual viewer probably isn’t interested in spending $102.98 without shipping costs (according to math done by a TrekCore commenter) to get the majority of the special features.

And that’s undoubtedly math that Paramount is counting on — has, in fact, counted on in the past.

But trying to keep an entire industry alive on the backs of devoted fans craving limited edition features isn’t the most solid business model. It’s a solution that speaks of short-term thinking, at a time when the rise of HD-quality video coincides with ever-shrinking data caps.

The physical media world has enough problems — why alienate the consumers who are still shelling out cash?

Paramount is going to have to do an about face and give fans the all-in-one DVD that has EVERYTHING. This is shameful that they would exploit fans of their hard earn money and they will do so much damage to their own brand name that you could have a very long and sustained boycott. Somewhere right now, a bunch of Paramount suits are sweating the negative reaction and looking to see what they can do to stem the tides. My solution would be to pull this ASAP and delay the release until they can produce the all-in-one DVD. Won't happen. The other solution and more likely one would be that anyone that buys this f*cked up version gets dibs on the all-in-one DVD for free. I'm sure the physical disc/case will have some sort of "coupon" or proof of purchase that they can send in to claim their new Blu-ray. Paramount better do something like this because I have already started my boycott. I would urge EVERYONE to cancel their pre-orders from whatever store they bought it from. What sucks is that a lot of people don't even know about this and may never know about it unless they are are DVD enthusiast and are members of online forums to get this much-needed information.

And don't even get me started on this iTunes-only Commentary track bullsh*t. What about the people that don't have internet access? So Paramount is going to punish those fans by excluding content all together? Man I want to punch a Suit right now.

I doubt that they're sweating sh*t. Also, I believe that a lot of this is Bad Robot's idea as well, which is another real slap in the face to fans (one of many from them, fans will no doubt tell you). It's so shockingly anti-consumer that the ENTIRE Into Darkness experience seems like it was deliberately designed to p*ss fans off, like they gave Abrams sh*t for the first movie and all of this is his revenge, from the postponement to the weak characters to the shoehorning in of a villain for NO REASON...

Meanwhile, I dug up my copy of Clerks on Blu-Ray and I'm honestly astounded at how much is on there, whole different versions of the movie, several commentaries, deleted scenes, documentaries, trailers, commercials, the whole nine yards and that's a standard. Heck, those are the blu-rays that I have the most confidence in buying because I know Smith appreciates his audience.

Now, I was thinking about the idea of retailer exclusives, and here's how I would have done it for Into Darkness: Depending on which store you go to, there's a different case: Enterprise, Vengeance, or Klingon. And the menus on the blu-ray look like the computer controls from the various ships. They ALL have the same special features, BUT because the menus are different there's maybe one or two unmarked easter eggs that are different. The main ones being a little one-minute video (so they can be shared on Youtube when found) shot on set, the Enterprise one has a little video of Kirk and Spock talking to the home viewer (almost like the videos in front of an amusement park ride), the Vengeance one has Cumberbatch warning the home viewer, and the Klingon one has Uhura in the Mudd ship cockpit telling us to "hang on!" Little exclusives like THAT I would be okay with. Exclusives are meant to allow the fans to pick a design and motif they like, to express their fandom in a way, not to force them to choose sh*t.